Lluis Padro

Lluís Padró is an Associate Professor at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). His research interests lie in Artificial Intelligence, specifically Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a particular focus on the development of language analysers and industrial applications of NLP.

He has published more than 150 papers at prestigious conferences, including ACL, ANLP, NAACL, EACL, COLING, EMNLP, ICDM and CAISE, and in journals such as Machine Learning, Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, Data & Knowledge Engineering and JAMIA. He has also served on the programme committees of leading conferences, including ACL, EACL, EMNLP, ICML, IJCAI and LREC, as well as for several journals. He has supervised 12 PhD theses and participated in numerous expert panels.

He has participated in or led 15 competitive research projects funded by the Spanish and Catalan governments, as well as seven EU-funded projects. He has also participated in or led several projects involving knowledge transfer to industry, carrying out consultancy work and coordinating the development of NLP systems.

From 2012 to 2016, he was Head of the UPC TALP (Language and Speech Technologies and Applications) Research Centre, where he gave a strong impetus to the Centre’s knowledge transfer activities. During this period, the TALP Research Centre joined the CIT-UPC Foundation in 2013 and the Catalan Government’s TECNIO programme in 2016.

He is also the founder, administrator and main developer of the FreeLing project, an open-source suite offering language analysis services in a variety of languages. FreeLing is designed as a foundation for the development of NLP applications, including machine translation, semantic indexing and retrieval, summarisation and dialogue systems. It also provides a channel through which research developed at the TALP Research Centre can reach the scientific and industrial communities. With more than 26,000 downloads of versions 4.x and nearly 1,500 citations reported by Google Scholar, FreeLing has developed an active community of users.

FreeLing has also been dual-licensed to companies for integration into proprietary applications and has been used in several industrial projects.

Since 2021, Padró has been Co-founder and NLP Researcher at ProcessTalks S.L., a UPC spin-off applying Artificial Intelligence to business process modelling and automation, with the aim of facilitating digital transformation across different types of organisations.